


Circling

by dance_across



Category: due South
Genre: Angst, First Time, M/M, POV First Person, POV Fraser, Post-Call of the Wild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 09:20:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5042725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dance_across/pseuds/dance_across
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fraser's been talking in his sleep. Ray's been listening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circling

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Кругами](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12108570) by [Luna44](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna44/pseuds/Luna44)



“Fraser, you finally gonna kiss me tonight or what?”

That’s how it begins: with a comment so out of left field, as it were, that I’m inclined to believe I’ve simply misheard him.

“And what’d you do to the floor, anyway?” Ray continues, peering down at the space around his shoes. Then he adds a third question to the growing pile: “Hey, you remember the time on that boat?”

At last, a reasonable question to which I might have an answer.

“Do you mean the _Henry Allen_ or the _Bounty_ , Ray?”

He peers at me with glassy eyes. “Either. Both. Whatever. No, I guess more the second one. The wooden one. The _Bounty_. The _Bounty_ full of Mounties.” He giggles, high-pitched and strange; a hiccup interrupts the sound. “The floor was all funny there too. This is like that.”

It takes me a moment to piece together what he’s trying to say, but finally I do. “Do you mean you feel that the floor is swaying?”

He smiles broadly and claps me on the shoulder. “I mean I _feel_ the floor is swaying because the floor _is_ swaying.”

His hand is still on my shoulder, holding tightly. It occurs to me then that I’ve sussed out the root of his second and third questions, but not yet the first. But the first question doesn’t bear thinking about, especially in his present condition. I clear my throat.

“Might I suggest, Ray, that the alcohol you’ve imbibed this evening might be a factor in your perceptions about the floor?”

“Alcohol!” he says, dismissing the whole idea with a wave of both his hands. “I’ve had four shots. That’s nothing. Nada. I got the tolerance of a bull, Fraser. Four shots gonna bring me down? Not today, pal. Not today, not never.”

Except that today is the first day in nearly three months that Ray has consumed any liquid besides water or tea. And as I was foolishly distracted with the oft-volatile symptoms of his caffeine withdrawal (there was no coffee to be had on the ice), it simply never occurred to me that caffeine was far from the only substance to which Ray had built up a tolerance over the course of his lifetime.

And now, in celebration of our first night back in what he likes to call “civilization,” he has just poured four shots of Irish whiskey down his throat. The hotel’s barman is, even now, eyeing him, likely wondering if he’ll order a fifth.

“Perhaps,” I suggest slowly, “it might be time to drink water instead.”

“Fuck water,” he says with a laugh. “Water’s just more snow. I swear to you, Fraser, if I don’t see snow ever again for as long as I live, I will die a happy man. Maybe not as long as I live. Yeah, yeah, never mind that. Just until next winter. Just let me wait till then, and I’m good. Bring on the summer, my friend. Bring on the summer! I. Am. Ready.”

I want so badly to tell him that summer is beautiful up here. It’s cold at night, certainly, but nowhere near as cold as it is now. And the flora is lovely, probably unlike anything he’s ever experienced. There are hikes to be taken. Fish to be caught. There’d be a fireplace for the hours after the sun goes down. I want to tell him that. I want to ask him to stay.

I open my mouth, for the hundredth time since we set off on our adventure, to ask. But before I can speak, the same old doubts come crawling in. What can I offer him up here? I can’t guarantee him a job. I can’t make the weather more to his liking. I don’t even have a home for myself, let alone for myself and another.

By the time I plow through these thoughts and out the other side, Ray is already moving on: “Say, Frase, you got the room key? I dunno where I put mine.”

“In the left pocket of your jacket,” I say, without even thinking first. I know this, of course, because I haven’t been able to take my eyes off him since we arrived here. Since we came to this hotel, bedraggled and still smelling of the dogs we’d just boarded with my half-sister for the night, and paid in full for a room with two beds. Since I offered him the first shower, from which he then emerged clean-shaven, smelling of soap, and wearing only a towel over his leanly-muscled, travel-hardened body.

He doesn’t seem to take my abrupt answer, however, as indicative of the attention I’ve been paying him. He simply reaches into the pocket in question, pulls out the key, and says, “Oh. Yeah, right, yeah. Okay. Hey, where’s the barkeep? I should get one more for the road.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” I tell him firmly. “You’ll be sick. You should ask for a glass of water.”

I’m just about to flag down the barman and ask on his behalf, when he says, “And _you_ , Fraser my friend, you should kiss me. Hey, you never did answer me about that. You gonna?”

I stare at him, my arm frozen halfway into the act of vying for the barman’s attention. His eyelids are at half-mast, heavy with alcohol and, likely, fatigue. His smile is loose and lazy—the smile of a gambler who might just as easily be bluffing as not. He is a trickster, my Ray. Even inebriated. He is Amaguq, still wolfish even in his human form.

I take a moment and a breath. I sip at my mineral water and gather my thoughts as best I can. Then I say, “Well, you see, I haven’t answered because I haven’t managed to ascertain the reasoning behind the inquiry, and as such—”

“Oh, come on, don’t do that thing.”

“What thing?” (I know what thing he means.)

“The thing where you _circle_ , you know, you talk around in circles to try and shake me off.” He leans both elbows on the table, nearly knocking over the small candle that sits between our two glasses. “It’s a yes-or-no question. Answer it.”

There’s a prickling feeling at the back of my neck. I ignore it for now, and though every instinct I have is telling me to shy away from him, to drop my gaze, to suggest that he pay for his drinks so he can get some sleep, I can’t look away. I can’t refuse to answer.

Do I _want_ to kiss him? God knows I do. I’ve wanted that for far longer than just the three months we’ve been alone together on the ice. But he didn’t ask if I wanted to; he asked if I was _going_ to.

“I… honestly don’t know, Ray.”

His eyes narrow. He might accuse me of circling to shake him off, but at the moment I’m inclined to accuse him of circling to hem me in. I feel trapped. Between desire and practicality. Between past experience and present company. Between the razor-sharp directness of Ray’s question and the alcohol lurking behind Ray’s eyes.

“You don’t know,” he says. Sneers.

I shake my head, helplessly.

“You don’t know, you don’t know, okay,” he mutters. Then he visibly gathers himself and directs all his energy into a single index finger, which he points across the table at me. “Well, here’s what I know. I know I spent four million years out there with you.” (It was three months; I don’t correct him.) “Hunting, cooking, eating, driving the sled, whatever. Sleeping. I slept right by you, and you talk in your sleep. Did you know that? You know you talk in your sleep?”

My neck grows tense with mortification. No, I didn’t know that. I’ve only rarely had occasion to share my sleeping quarters with another human being, and Dief’s never brought it up. He probably knows that if he did, I’d only bring up his snoring, which would embarrass him.

“What did I say?” I ask, clutching my glass of mineral water with both hands.

“Oh, loads of stuff,” he says, grinning that trickster grin. “I wrote some of it down. Future blackmail material.”

“You did?” I say, feeling a heady rush of relief. The future! Ray is talking about the future.

“There was one night you told a whole story,” he says. “It was about a moose, and it didn’t make hardly any sense, but I guess half your stories don’t make sense when you’re _not_ asleep, so whatever. You said stuff about cabbage—” 

“Oh dear,” I murmur, thinking of my infamously late uncle Tiberius.

“—and you talked to Dief.” He leans back in his seat and adds, almost like an afterthought, “And you also talked to me.”

I ask, for the second time, “What did I say?”

He laughs, low in his throat. “Loads of stuff. You told me what you wanted to do to me. And where. You listed a lot of interesting body parts, Fraser.” His grin turns lascivious, and I know exactly which body parts he’s talking about. Or at least one of them. “You were _dreaming_ about me.”

The heat in this bar is stifling. Or it’s possible I’m overdressed. Both, perhaps. But yes, yes, I did dream of him. I often have, both before our adventure and during. I didn’t know, though, that my traitorous mouth occasionally saw fit to share the contents of my dreams without asking my permission first. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. How could I have known? There wasn’t ever anyone who could have told me.

“Why did you wait until _now_ to say something?” I ask.

He gives a one-shouldered shrug. “Felt like the time was right. Exactly right.”

 _The time was right._ What in the world is that supposed to mean?

“I-I’m sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable,” I begin calmly, calmly, so calmly. “But surely you understand that I had no control over—er. Ray, there are many theories about why dreams play out as they do. Did you know? While some say that they are the manifestations of the desires of the subconscious, many believe, _conversely,_ that…”

But I trail off, because he is laughing at me.

Laughing.

“Fraser, buddy, your _face_! You’re so red!” He presses a hand to his chest, laughing even harder as I try to keep myself where I am. To keep my lungs working, to keep my face under my control. To understand why he surprised me with such an intimate revelation, only to laugh at it.

I breathe. I breathe.

When he finally calms down enough, he says, “Sorry, Frase, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—no, see, I just thought it was so funny, your face when you—but it’s _fine_ , it’s fine, it’s more than fine! It’s… okay, maybe I was exaggerating a bit.”

There, finally, is something I can understand in the jumble of whiskey-soaked words he just threw at me. “Exaggerating?” I ask faintly. Hopefully.

“There were no…” He moves one loose-wristed hand in a circle as he searches for what he wants to say. “Body parts. Nothing like that. I mean it’s _you_ , right? Even when you’re sleeping, you’re all, whatsit, buttoned up.”

I try to relax my shoulders, and find it difficult. It’s never been my intention to be buttoned up for Ray. Quite the opposite, in fact. But habit always creeps back in when I forget to pay attention, and so, buttoned up it always is.

There are worse habits to have, I suppose, than being closed off to those around you. Right now, though, I cannot think of a single one.

Again, I breathe. Then I ask, “So I don’t talk in my sleep?”

“Sure you do,” says Ray, lowering his voice, gesturing at me with his empty whiskey glass. “Just not in, ya know, detail. Except one thing, which was—well, guess. Here’s a hint: it is directly related to the question I keep asking you.”

I’m still reeling a little from his laughter, so it takes me a moment. But I realize it quickly: “I said I wanted to kiss you.”

He nods. And there it is, out in the open between us, as it’s never been before. I admitted it sleeping, and he challenged it awake. _Are you going to kiss me_? The look in his eyes tells me, very plainly, that he wants the answer to be yes.

Only he’s leaving, maybe as soon as tomorrow. Why, why would he wait until now to say all this? Why is _now_ the exact right time? I can’t bring myself to ask. Nor can I bring myself to answer him, either with words or without. I am frozen in the spotlight of his stare.

Ray blinks. Shifts his gaze away. “Look, it’s okay if you don’t want—I mean, it’s cool to not want the same stuff in real life. I was just… you know, just _wondering_ , and… it’s fine, it’s great, we’re cool. Right? We’re cool?”

His voice is edged with fright now, and even desperation. And in this, I finally have my answer. Ray did not ask sooner because he was afraid I might say no. Because he was afraid, likely, of _how_ I would say no. Goodness, how must he see me in moments like this? How buttoned-up must I appear to him?

The next move is mine. I can’t freeze up again.

Ray is sitting on the table’s padded bench, his back to the wall. I, in the chair opposite. There’s no room for him next to me, but his bench is wide enough for two. So before I can tell myself all the reasons I ought to stay right where I am… I move. I get up and plant myself beside him, my hip pressing into his.

I reach across us, take hold of his left cheek with my right hand, and I turn his face to mine. His face is taut, still echoing _Are you going to kiss me?_

 _Yes_ , I tell him silently, as I taste his lips. _Yes_ and _yes_ and _yes_ and _stay, please, stay._

When he pulls away from me, it’s because we’ve both just heard the clearing of a throat right above us. We look up, our heads moving in tandem. The barman, standing over us, has a slip of paper in his hand and an uncertain look on his face.

“Can we help you?” says Ray peevishly. “My buddy and I were kinda in the middle of something.”

The barman clears his throat again. “Your check,” he says, and hands Ray the slip of paper.

“What if I want another whiskey?” asks Ray. There’s suspicion gathering in his eyes, a challenge rising in his tone.

“I, er…” The barman dithers for a moment, and I catch him looking to his left, at the row of stools lining the bar. There are three people sitting there. One and two: a pair of young women drinking wine and talking with their heads bent close, conspiratorial. Three: a grizzled older gentleman wearing a ratty flannel and a murderous expression, the latter of which is aimed directly at Ray and me.

Ah. I see.

“You’ve had enough whiskey for tonight,” I tell Ray quietly, pressing two fingers to his wrist in hopes of calming him. I still don’t know if he’s seen the old man at the bar. “Let’s go up to the room.”

The barman’s neck turns pink. Good.

Ray settles the bill, and as we leave I’m awfully tempted to brush past the old man and say something that will make him rethink his judgment of us—but the fact is, I simply don’t have the energy. Ray, though, turns around at the base of the stairs and catches the old man’s eye. He extends both his middle fingers, presses them to his lips, and raises them to the old man as though in a toast.

The old man sneers at us, and I smile. I touch Ray’s waist, tentatively, just above his belt. He slings a heavy arm around my neck, hand clutching my shoulder. It is like this that we climb the stairs to our second-floor hotel room.

-

The journey from bar to room takes us not even five minutes, but it’s five minutes more than I would have preferred. Not because I’m that eager to kiss Ray again without the interference of others, although that’s undeniably true, but because it gives me time to think. To overanalyze, to second-guess, to follow my desires to their inevitable end—which is to say, with Ray leaving sometime in the next week, just as he’s always planned, and me, alone, as always.

I wonder what will happen in our hotel room tonight. I don’t yet know how far I will push this newfound intimacy between us, but I suspect Ray will push harder and faster. I also suspect that I will give him whatever he asks for. I _want_ to give him whatever he asks for. I want that more than anything.

But the depth of loss I will feel when Ray leaves is already immeasurable. How much worse will it become if, tonight, we share more than the friendship we already have?

 _Stay_ , I want to tell him, as he opens the hotel door and waves me inside with a gentlemanly after-you gesture. _Stay_ , as I turn on the light and he closes the door behind us. _Stay_ , as he comes toward me, his body radiating a very specific intention.

I am silent.

“What’d you dream about, when you dreamed about me?” he asks, low and husky. He is so close to me. I can feel the heat of his body. I can smell the whiskey carrying his question.

“A lot of things,” I reply, taking a step backwards, though I don’t know why. No, I do. He is crowding me. And while I _want_ him to crowd me, my desire for him is working against years of carefully-honed instinct. I take another step back, even though I don’t want to.

“Oh yeah?” Evidently he takes my retreat as a challenge, because he’s moving forward, pacing his steps to mine. “Like what? Show me.”

The truth is, there were so many dreams, and each one was a kaleidoscope of fingertips and whispers and longing, shoulder blades and hipbones and lips and warmth and Ray’s blue, blue, blue eyes. I don’t remember any one thing vividly enough to attempt replication.

“Ray,” I say.

“Fraser,” he replies, and maybe he doesn’t feel inclined to wait any longer for my answer, or maybe he’s forgotten his own question already, but that’s when he takes hold of my face, one hand under each side of my jaw, fingertips resting just behind my ears, and kisses me.

 _Stay. Stay. Stay._ I kiss him back, of course. _Stay_. My every cell thrills at the smoothness of his newly-shaven skin, at his teeth catching my lower lip, at the rumbling in his throat when his tongue finds mine. _Stay, oh, stay._

I’m so caught in the kiss that I’ve failed to notice him steering me across the room—until my legs come up against the end of a bed. His bed. The one closer to the bathroom. Unfazed, he continues kissing me, his lips moving across my cheek, over my jaw, down my neck…

I lick my lips. Whiskey. A taste to match the smell lingering in my nose. So much whiskey.

“Ray,” I say, as panic begins to set in. “Ray. Ray. Ray. _Ray_.”

“Mm?” he says, his head jerking up, eyes blinking rapidly as if emerging into daylight. As if coming suddenly awake.

“Are you—”

“Fraser, I swear to you, you ask me if I’m sure about what we’re doing here, I swear I _swear_ I will pop you one.”

“I was going to ask if you’re certain you’re sober enough to—”

“To get it up? Oh, ha, hey, you don’t even _know_.” He grabs my hand and places it squarely over his zipper. He is hard. The knowledge sets my heart to racing, for entirely the wrong reasons.

I force myself to focus. Carefully, I remove my hand.

“I meant,” I say slowly, taking hold of his shoulders, “are you sober enough to—well, to consent?”

He leers. “And what, pray tell, am I consenting to?”

Oh, lord.

“Answer me,” I say firmly.

“Fraser, god, yeah, I’m fine. Stop babying me. I’m tipsy, not wasted. Let’s just—” And he sneaks a hand down to the zipper of _my_ jeans. And frowns at what he finds there—or, rather, what he doesn’t. “Hey, hold on. You not into this, buddy?”

“I am,” I say, twisting away from his prying hands. “I am. It’s only that I—I’m—”

I can’t find the words. Or I’ve found too many words, and I can’t narrow down the possibilities, probabilities, inevitabilities, into anything he’ll understand. My face is hot; my heartbeat echoes double-time in my ears.

“You’re what?” asks Ray. All evidence of the whiskey’s influence is gone from his eyes, and he’s studying me like he’s on the clock. Like I’m a suspect, or evidence. He spoke truthfully a moment ago; he is not, as he puts it, wasted. “Fraser, you’re what?”

I open my mouth. What comes out is, “I love you.”

Ray’s eyes widen, first in amazement, then in confusion.

Then I say, “But.” (No, no. Not _but_.) “And.”

He waits. He is patient. He is, on occasion, far more patient with me than I am with myself. “And?” he prompts, quietly, after a moment.

“And I don’t often love people.” It’s a poor summary of all that I want to tell him, but it will have to do.

He nods. Slow, steady, as his expression grows more and more perplexed. “You mean, like…” He makes a circling motion with his hand, like he’s searching for words. (Those long, graceful fingers, oh, oh.) “Like physically? Or feelings-wise?”

“Both,” I reply, grateful for the simplicity of the question. I smile at him as best I can, and I say, all in one breath, “If you’d like me to be honest, Ray, I’m actually quite terrified.”

And with that, something shakes loose. I’m trembling. I want to be aroused for him—I want him to reach down and feel me, hot and ready beneath his hand as evidence of how much I want him—but I can’t. I can’t. And it’s not that I don’t want him in that way. God knows I do. But my brain is the only part of me that seems to be aware of this. The message isn’t being transmitted anywhere else.

My throat constricts. When did my own body become so foreign to me?

(The answer is easy, of course: Sometime between Ray Vecchio shooting me and right now. And it wasn’t the bullet that did it.)

“Hey, hey.” Ray gathers me in his arms, and I let myself be gathered, closing my eyes, pressing my face into his shoulder. His neck smells of whiskey, of sweat, of the soap from his shower. “You got nothing to be scared of. It’s just me, buddy. Same old me. Dumb jokes, dumb hair, drinking too much, wondering if I can get my best friend into bed. Same old same old.”

 _Best friend._ The phrase calms me. It’s a reminder of the unshakeable thing that we already are, drawing my focus away from the amorphous thing that we are, maybe, trying to become.

“Your hair isn’t dumb,” I whisper into his neck.

“Ha. No?”

“I love your hair,” I tell him.

“I love yours, too,” he says, and I feel his hand on the back of my head, fingers threading through hair badly in need of cutting. Fingernails scraping gently at the skin beneath. It feels good. More than good.

“I love your hands,” I say, feeling myself start to relax as he continues to massage my scalp.

“I love your ass,” he says, which makes me laugh a little.

I pause, then tell him: “I love your courage.”

“Pssh,” he says, still massaging. “Ain’t got much of that to spare.”

“Ray,” I say, lifting my head from his shoulder so I can look him in the eye. “You left behind everything you knew in order to explore a wilderness that could have killed you, and with only me to save you if anything went wrong.”

He considers this. “That wasn’t courage, Fraser. That was me trusting you.”

I blink at him. There’s nothing I can say to that. Nothing at all.

Ray grins slyly. “And don’t you forget, I saved your ass just as much as you saved mine.”

“Well, maybe not _just_ as much,” I say, before I can stop myself. Not that I’ve been keeping track. I haven’t, really. Well, not on purpose.

His massaging hand becomes a loose fist, just long enough to knock lightly on my skull. “It ain’t a contest.”

“Ow,” I say.

His reply comes in the form of another kiss. It only lasts for a second or two before he pulls away again and looks at me. Scrutinizes me.

“So you _are_ into this,” he says.

I nod.

“You want me?” he says, as a frown creases his forehead. “Like as much as I want you?”

I nod—but this time it’s not enough. “More,” I tell him. “More than anyone’s ever wanted anything.”

“But… you’re scared.”

I close my eyes.

“So here’s a question. What’re you scared _of_?”

“It’s…” I lick my lips. It’s too big to explain. It’s sex, and it’s Victoria, and it’s the overwhelming love for Ray that I’ve kept bottled up for the better part of two years, and somehow these things have all tangled up and formed a specter that’s all the more horrifying for my inability to describe it.

“Come on,” he says, low and urgent. “Tell me. Tell me in some Inuit legend if you have to. Or some story about your dad and his farty partner. Just _tell_ me.”

My father, who I saw for the very last time down in the mineshaft. He wouldn’t know how to express this feeling to Ray, were he in my shoes. He would likely choose to avoid the subject altogether. But my mother. She would know. I remember the touch of her hand, and the words come to me, simple and clear as summer water:

“You’re leaving.”

There. It’s said. Ray frowns, and I go on: “I’m going to lose you soon, Ray, and so I’d rather… I’d very much rather it not be… ah, I’d rather…”

“What idiot said you’re gonna lose me?” says Ray.

“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? Our adventure is over. You’ll want to back to Chicago, and—”

“Fuck Chicago,” says Ray. “And fuck reason. And, you know what, fuck _you_ for just assuming shit like that.”

I admit it; his tone takes me aback. “Ray, I never intended to offend you in any way. It’s only that my life up here is so vastly different from the kind of comfort you’re—”

“Without even _asking_ me!” he says, pulling away from me. My body is cold without his arms around it. “You just assumed!”

I narrow my eyes. “Fine. I’ll ask. Ray, would you like to give up your life in Chicago indefinitely, in order to live with me in what you often describe to me as, and I quote, ‘the icy ass-end of frozen fucking nowhere’?”

Ray shrugs. “Sure.”

Instantly, I am at a loss. At any other time, I might take his response as a joke—but trickster though Ray may be, he isn’t so cruel as to joke with me now, given the nature of what I’ve just told him. Besides, he looks dead serious.

“Ray, you… you can’t just…”

“Sure I can,” he replies. “I want to, so I can.”

“But you—you’ve got nowhere to—and no job! Your whole life is down in Chicago, Ray.”

“Yeah, sure,” he says with a humorless laugh. “You mean the real one or the undercover one? Or, wait, you mean the one where I was in a falling-apart marriage, or the one where she finally left me and I wasted a bunch of time wanting her back?”

These are fair points. Still, it’s clear he’s not thinking this through.

“Your apartment,” I say.

“I’ll sublet,” he counters.

“Your turtle.”

“Called Stella before we left Frobisher’s,” he says. “She’s been feeding him for me, and she’ll take him if I ask. He was half hers anyway.”

“Your citizenship. You’ll have trouble finding work.”

“The guy who helped the famous Mountie stop a _nuke_?” He grins. “No, I won’t.”

I’m running out of arguments fast. So I give him the same one he’s given me countless times over the past three months: “Ray, it’s _cold_ up here.”

“Yeah, this I’ve noticed. But all that stuff, that’s just linguistics.”

“You mean logistics,” I say.

He rolls his eyes. “Whatever. It’ll work itself out, Fraser. It will. The only thing I gotta know is, do _you_ want me to stay?”

“Yes. God. Yes.” I want him to stay so badly that the question has been stuck halfway between my heart and my throat for three whole months. “I just wanted you to know that it won’t be easy.”

“Nothing ever is, with you,” he says, and then, all at once, he’s kissing me again.

His tongue eases my lips open, and in short time our kisses grow sloppy, hot, passionate. I put everything I feel for him into the movement of my mouth—and yet somehow, when he presses the length of his body against me again, he still finds my physical reaction… wanting.

This time, though, he doesn’t comment on it, or even ask about it. Instead, he unbuckles my belt—deftly; I suspect he’s done this before—and slips one hand into my shorts. And when he touches my penis with cool fingertips, I feel a flare of heat. Not enough to make me harden, but enough to feel good. I moan into his mouth. He chuckles into mine.

When he pulls away, he keeps his left hand hidden down my shorts, stroking me gently and patiently. His right hand takes _my_ right hand and lifts it to his mouth. With lips pinkened from kissing me, he catches my index finger. Licks it. Sucks at it. Holds my eyes with his the whole time. The implication, the silent question in his eyes, couldn’t be more clear.

I nod. A silent answer.

Ray’s right hand joins his left, and together they conspire to divest me of my jeans, my shorts, and even my socks. Then my shirt, and the undershirt beneath it. Soon I am completely naked. Completely at his mercy. I fight the urge to cover myself with my hands.

Nudity itself doesn’t usually bother me, and Ray and I have changed clothing in front of each other many times over the past three months. But nudity with _intention_ is… different. His eyes are on me. I can feel him looking.

I reach for him, intending to undress him as well—but he blocks my hands with his. Leans in to kiss me, soft and chaste. Then he says, “Lie down, Fraser.”

“But your clothes.”

“Later,” he says impatiently. “I got some stuff I wanna do first.”

My eyes flick down to the bulge in his jeans. If he’s still as hard as he was a few minutes ago, it can’t be comfortable, keeping those on. But his tone is firm, and I don’t argue. And when he tells me again to lie down, I do as he says.

He spreads himself atop me, the fabric of his shirt an interesting texture against my chest, the denim of his jeans rough against my legs. Heat flares inside me again, and settles into a low burn as he kisses me again. I reach up and stroke his hair with my hands.

Before long, his kisses begin to move down to my neck, my shoulders, my chest. His tongue swipes over one nipple, then the other; I flinch with pleasure each time, and he grins up at me. I know what that grin means. It means he is learning secrets about me, and he is enjoying it.

I am enjoying it too. I just wish I could relax enough to enjoy it _without_ the edge of fear that still looms large about this whole thing.

Kneeling between my legs, he kisses his way down my stomach, his destination growing ever nearer. He kisses the crease of my hip, which tickles enough that I smile and bite my lip. He kisses the inside of my thigh, which makes me shiver and makes him, in turn, laugh low in his throat. Then his eyes rise to meet mine again, and he kisses the very tip of my penis.

“My Ray,” I say, without meaning to.

He lowers his eyelids to half-mast and gives me a filthy grin.

“My Fraser,” he replies, and takes me into his mouth. Still flaccid, I am small enough that I fit inside easily.

“Oh,” I say, clutching at the bedspread with both hands. He is wet and hot and living, breathing against my skin. The sensation is… overwhelming. Enough that I barely stop my hips from bucking off the bed. “Ohhh.”

Ray’s eyes glint with satisfaction, and inside the warm cavern of his mouth, his tongue begins to move. Stroking me from crown to root and back again. And again. And again. And then he begins to _suck_. I watch as his cheeks hollow around me, sight mirroring feeling.

“Ray,” I say, and reach for him with one hand. My fingertips brush his cheeks, his nose, his hair. “Ray, Ray, Ray.”

“Mm?” he says, and the sound rumbles into me, echoing through my bones.

“Ray,” I say again. I seem to have lost the capacity to say anything else.

He sucks and sucks, his hands kneading at my thighs, and it is with no small measure of delight that I soon find myself relaxing utterly into the feeling of his touch. And on top of that, I find myself growing hard within Ray’s mouth. Hard enough that soon I am panting with the intensity of it; hard enough that I can no longer fit entirely within him.

“Yeah,” he says, as he lets me go for the first time in… lord, it feels like _years_. He blows softly on my erection, and I shiver in pleasure. I’m still wet with his saliva. “Yeah, that’s it, Fraser. See? Like I said. Nothing to be scared of. Just me.”

And it’s true. Somehow, the fear has dissipated, leaving me utterly unsure of why it had been there in the first place. Was it giving myself over to feeling? Was it intimacy, plain and simple? Was it to do with Ray, or Victoria before him, or my utter lack of experience otherwise? Whatever it was, it’s long gone now, buried beneath the arousal Ray has elicited in me, and the tenderness I feel toward him.

He bends to lick me one more time, then looks back up at me. “The question is, what next?”

“Kiss me,” I reply, without even having to think about it. He crawls up the bed to straddle my chest, and he leans down, and I lean up, and he gives me what I want. I taste something new on his lips this time. Myself, perhaps.

Then he says, “But what _next_?” Tracing a finger over my collarbone, he says, “See, I could keep on sucking you, Fraser. And I’d enjoy the hell out of it, too. I’d suck you till you couldn’t take it anymore, until you exploded, see, and then I’d swallow everything you gave me.”

I wriggle beneath him, quite unintentionally. Grinning, he reaches behind himself and wraps his hand around my penis. He strokes loosely, gently. My whole body tenses with the feeling, and I make myself say, “Yes. Please, yes—if you want to.”

“I’m asking what _you_ want,” he says.

“I want you,” I reply. The simplicity of those words feels more honest than every honest thing I’ve ever said in my life. So I go on. “In any way—in _every_ way—in whatever way you want. I’m yours, Ray. I’m yours.”

His eyes seem to grow darker, and he leans down to kiss me. Hungrily. With teeth, this time. My chest shudders beneath him, and my arousal grows heavier, heavier, unstoppable now that it remembers how to exist. I am his, and I am pure sensation. I want never to leave this room. I want Ray to pin me like this forever, and not let me go. I want to feel his desire of me for the rest of my life—and I want to give him the same thing in return.

When the kiss ends, he says, “You wanna know what I really want, Fraser?”

“Tell me.”

“What I really want, see, is for you to keep on lying there while I take these stupid-ass pants off”—he climbs off me then, and begins rapidly undressing himself—“and I wanna sit down on you and fuck myself on that pretty dick of yours.” That grin again. (Oh, that grin again, and the beautiful obscenity of his phrasing!) “But you kinda need supplies for that, and I don’t got any. So what I _realistically_ want is for us to get off. Together. Like _at the same time_ together. I wanna make that happen. You game?”

I nod, rendered mute all over again. Both by wondering how he plans to achieve this, and by the sight of him, now as naked as I am. He is wiry and lithe, just as I’ve seen many times before. But unlike all those other times, my eyes are drawn downward. He is just as erect as I am.

I stare. I can’t help it.

“Checkin’ me out, Fraser?” he says, wrapping a hand around himself and stroking once, twice, as he steps toward the bed again. There’s a hint of swagger, of bravado, in his step. In his voice, too. I wonder if that means he’s nervous. It usually does.

“Indeed,” I say, as I sit up and move toward him. He stands before me, and I rest one hand on his hip, anchoring him in place. Smiling up at him, I say, “And I like what I see.”

“Pssh,” he says, rolling his eyes. Dismissal, now, instead of bravado. Oh, Ray.

I touch him then, just at the top of his stomach, just under his ribs. I let my fingers take in the texture of his skin, moving with the rapidly-increasing speed of his breath—and by the time I reach his hips, a small drop of moisture has appeared at the tip of his penis.

“Ray,” I say, “may I taste you?”

“ _May_ you,” he says, laughing low in his throat. “Well, ha, ya know. If you insist.”

So I reach out with my tongue and lick that little drop away.

“Jesus,” says Ray, and grabs a handful of my hair. It pulls a little, but I don’t mind. In fact, I find that I quite enjoy it.

I move myself closer to the edge of the bed. Close enough that I can kiss the darkened crown of him, that I can then lick the length of him, that I can take him into my mouth, as far as he’ll go.

I’ve never done this before. Not to anyone. It’s a strange place to be, certainly—but it’s enjoyable. All the more so for the sounds that Ray makes as I begin to suck him.

“God god god Jesus _god_ ,” Ray says after a moment, pulling harder at my hair. “You gotta—okay, gotta stop—unless you want me to— _Jesus_ —”

Part of me does want to suck him until he ejaculates—but I find that I prefer the idea of _seeing_ him come instead of merely feeling it. I pull my mouth away. Look up at him.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he says heatedly, and bends down to kiss me again. Sucking, biting. I suck and bite him right back. Then he says, “Lie the fuck down, you.”

I grin at the vehemence of the order, and I obey it instantly. This time, when he climbs atop me, he sits on my thighs instead of my chest. He scoots forward until our erections line up, and then (and then!) he takes them _both_ in his hand, and strokes us _together_. The feel of it, the _sight_ of it—I nearly reach orgasm before three seconds have passed.

“Wait,” he says, as though he can read my mind. “You gotta wait.”

I’m not sure if I _can_ wait. I tell him so.

“Gotta wait till I say,” he says, and takes the pressure off me for a second, stroking only himself.

I bite my lip, trying with everything I have to hold myself in check. He strokes himself harder and faster, and he grunts, and he lets go of himself—only to grab both of us again in a single fist, just like before. I moan. The sight, the sensation, the _sounds_ he’s making…

“Oh man,” he says. “Oh yeah. _Ohhhh_ Jesus Christ yeah. You about ready, buddy?”

I nod.

“Then let’s _do_ this thing,” he says, and immediately comes to orgasm. I feel his buttocks clench against my thighs, and he throws his head back, and a jet of white spurts from him, landing on my stomach. The second spurt lands on my—my—oh— _oh_ , and I feel it too, now, rushing through me like a tidal wave, unstoppable, and my head presses back onto the bed, my neck straining with the effort of it, and there are sounds escaping me, whimpers, moans, uncontrollable _sounds_ that might be utterly shameful in any other context, but here, now, as wave after wave of pleasure pulses through me and out, out, onto my skin and onto Ray’s hand, nothing is shameful at all. There’s nothing but closeness and ecstasy and joy and, and, and _Ray_ , there, smiling at me when I open my eyes again.

I don’t remember closing them.

Tremors rake my body, and my thighs are shaking beneath the weight of him. I can’t move. Or I don’t want to. One of the two; I can’t pin down which one. So in lieu of moving, I simply look at him. My Ray. My trickster, who somehow tricked me into finding this part of myself again.

His eyes are heavy-lidded, his smile as satisfied as a cat’s. His chest is still heaving, and hair is even more unruly than usual, though still just as golden. Golden and utterly beautiful, like the rest of him.

“Sunshine,” I murmur.

“What’s that now?” he says, leaning slightly closer.

I blink. “Nothing. Nothing. Just…”

“You liked that?”

I nod, and I whisper, “I liked that.”

“Me too,” he says, and climbs off me. Stretches out beside me. I curl onto my side, all the better to face him. He idly swipes a finger across my belly; it comes away coated in white. He licks it. “Hm.”

“Hm?”

“We taste good together,” he says, and swipes his finger again so he can offer me a taste as well. I accept his offer, and he’s right. I don’t know for sure if it’s both of us I’m tasting (though if we continue down this road, I’m sure I’ll learn in time), but there’s something satisfying about thinking that it is.

Ray jumps off the bed and retrieves a washcloth from the bathroom, damp with warm water. He rubs me down with it, then himself. I sigh happily into the rare, intimate feeling of being cared for.

He rinses out the cloth and leaves it in the bathroom. Then he turns off the lights and climbs back into bed beside me. Behind me, actually. I’m about to adjust accordingly, to turn myself around so I can see him—but before I can, he presses up against me, circling his thin body around my broad one so that I am half-cocooned by him. Surrounded by him. It makes me feel small. I never thought that I would enjoy feeling small, but it seems that I do.

Our breathing begins to find a rhythm to share, and he drapes an arm over my side. I catch his hand and press his fingers to my lips. “Do you still want to stay here with me?”

“More than anyone’s ever wanted anything,” he says. It takes me a moment to realize that he’s just echoed my own words back at me. He pauses. “ _You_ still want _me_ here?”

“I do, Ray. I do.”

And we fall asleep like that, tucked into each other as neatly and perfectly as spoons in a drawer. We drift apart during the night (I realize this when I wake up needing to use the bathroom), and that’s all right, too. I discover that as long as I am close enough to touch him, I am content.

I also discover, that night, that I am not the only one who occasionally talks in his sleep. Perhaps it’s triggered by what we shared, or perhaps it’s just a random coincidence, but as I lie beside Ray, he whispers things, both to me and about me. Kind things. Filthy things. Tender, loving things. Nonsensical things.

I consider telling him this, when he wakes up in the morning. But I don’t. Not yet.

I’ll tell him when the time is exactly right.


End file.
